Changes
by Simone Landon
Summary: A series of unconnected post-series ficlets about the changes that occur to Tristan, Bakura, Kaiba, and the others, all seen from the eyes of one Joseph Wheeler.
1. The Turning of the Years

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. The lyrics from "Valjean's Soliloquy" belong to Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schonberg, and Herbert Kretzmer, the geniuses behind that beautiful musical Les Misérables.

There's no particular reason that the dub names are being used -- they're still in Japan -- I just like the name "Tristan." It reminds me of the knights in armor and the code of chivalry, which is very fitting for his character.  
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_And have I fallen so far  
And is the hour so late  
That nothing remains but the cry of my hate,  
The cries in the dark that nobody hears  
Here where I stand at the turning of the years?  
  
If there's another way to go  
I missed it twenty long years ago.  
My life was a war that could never be won. . . .  
  
Yet why did I allow that man  
To touch my soul and teach me love?_

.

The night he turned eighteen, Ryō Bakura ran away.

At least, that was the date the police assumed he'd left, based on reports from his neighbors and classmates.  They couldn't be certain, since over a week had passed before anyone went to look for him, and the single letter he'd left had no date on it.

Tristan was the first to suspect something was wrong.  That didn't surprise him -- Tristan always seemed to have some sixth sense when it came to Bakura.  Joey had never questioned why.

He shrugged it off as paranoia at first, but when a week had passed and the next Monday Bakura still wasn't in class, Joey started listening.  That afternoon, he tagged along with Tristan to Bakura's apartment.  They spent a good half-hour knocking on the door and ringing the bell, but there was no answer.  Joey had finally said that Bakura might have gotten sick or had some kind of family emergency come up that forced him to go to his parents, but he didn't believe it.  Neither did Tristan, judging by the look on the guy's face; but he agreed to leave anyway.

When Joey caught up to him after school got out the next day, Tristan said he was going back to the apartment.  Joey went with him.

That time, Tristan didn't even bother to knock on the door.  Instead, he found the apartment that the landlord was living in and explained the situation.  Finally, the man agreed to open the place for them, but said that he was only doing it because the rent was coming up and Bakura -- who always paid in advance -- had yet to turn his in.

When they got inside, the place looked fine.  In fact, it looked immaculate.  It was vacuumed, the trash had been taken out, the curtains were pulled shut, and there were no dirty dishes or clothes lying around.  There was no Bakura, either.

On closer look, it had been cleaned out.  There was no food in the refrigerator, only a few clothes in the closet, and no trinkets like soap or shampoo or a toothbrush in the bathroom.

The landlord trailed behind them as they went through the rooms, and Joey ignored the fact that Tristan was looking around with a swiftness and certainty like he had been in the place before.  Been in the place enough to know where everything was supposed to be.

Only the trashcan in the bathroom hadn't been emptied, and that detail seemed almost deliberate.  They found three different boxes of hair dye in there.  As best as Joey could guess, Bakura could've triple-dyed his hair, or he could have given it two tones, or he could've just used one bottle and then poured the other two down the sink so that no one would know for sure what color he'd picked.  The bathroom was also vacuumed, but there were a pair of scissors tucked in the back of in one of the drawers; so it didn't really come as a shock when the police found a few stray cut hairs (still white) that the vacuum cleaner had missed.

They also found Bakura's school ID on his desk.  The picture had been scratched out until it was unrecognizable.

Tristan had stopped looking through the apartment when he saw that.  He just stood still and stared until the landlord ushered the two of them back outside and went to call the police.

The scary part was how **deliberate** everything was.  Bakura's father had given him a credit card to pay for his various expenses, but after the night of his birthday all expenses had stopped.  The last charge to the card was for a dinner at a restaurant a few blocks away from Bakura's apartment.  And there had been no checks written for anything since Bakura had paid last month's rent.  Wherever the teenager had gone, he'd paid his way with untraceable cash.  There were no sudden withdrawals of his savings, either; but when his parents checked the account they found that it was nearly drained.  So Bakura had to have been taken money out in small increments for . . . **months**, at the least.  It made Joey wonder how long he'd had been planning to leave.

He'd tried to talk to Tristan about that once, while the police and Bakura's parents were still going through the apartment and the accounts, but Tristan had just snarled at him to shut up and refused to say any more.

In fact, he wouldn't talk about Bakura at all.  Joey had complained about it Thursday when he was eating lunch with Yûgi and Téa, but Téa just hit him in the arm and told him he needed to stop asking.

"He'll talk when he wants to talk," she'd said quietly, a moment later.  ". . . Or he won't talk about it at all.  That's more like him, really. . . ."

Joey had frowned at her.  "Whadda ya mean?"

"Never mind."  Téa had shaken her head.  "It's . . . never mind.  Nothing."

She hadn't said anything else, despite his and Yûgi's prodding, and finally Joey had given up and just finished his lunch.

On Friday, the cops came and pulled Tristan out in the middle of second period.  He came back near the end of third.

During the break between classes, he told them that the police given him a letter Bakura had addressed to him, which they'd found hidden in one of the dresser drawers.  The police had read through it, and then Bakura's parents had seen it too; and then when they'd found no trace of a clue as to where Bakura had gone, they'd finally given it to Tristan after questioning him about some of the things (like the lines about "the Items") that the other teenager had referred to.

Yûgi and Devlin had pushed him to open it then and read what it said, but Tristan had refused and jammed it into the recesses of his desk.  When lunch came, Tristan slid the letter into his pocket, left the classroom and disappeared down the hallway before any of them could catch him.

When lunch was over, Tristan came back to the classroom, sat at his desk, stared blankly at the blackboard, and didn't speak to any of them until the next break between classes.  Then, he told them that Bakura had said he'd been planning to run away for almost a year.

"He said that as long as he stayed here, he was always gonna remember what happened with the Items and the other Yûgi," Tristan said, staring down at his folded hands.  "He said that as long as he was friends with us, he was never goin' to be able t' forget.  He felt like our friendship with him was always gonna to be . . . tainted or something, by what happened, or that we were friends because we pitied him for stuff."

"That's crazy!" Téa had exclaimed.  "Why . . . why would he think like that?"

"We've been friends for so long after the Items were gone -- why would he think it was still about that?" Yûgi asked.

Tristan shrugged.  "I'm just tellin' you what he wrote.  He said he couldn't change what happened, but he **could** start over somewhere where no one knew about it.  He. . . ."  Tristan swallowed heavily, and his hands clenched.  "He said thanks for the past three years, and asked us not to look for him.  Ever.  He wants t' start over."

Yûgi stared down at his desk.  ". . . We were never friends because of that," he murmured.  "Not just because of that. . . ."

Tristan shrugged again and didn't reply.

Then the teacher came in and the next period began.

It was obvious that they were all thinking about Bakura -- Yûgi doodled in the margins of his journal, Téa moved her feet nervously beneath her desk as if reflexively performing a dance to calm herself, Devlin toyed with his bangs, and Tristan just stared out the window.  Joey slumped in his seat and pretended to take notes.

There was more that Tristan wasn't telling them, he knew that.  He'd spent lunch looking for the guy and had finally found him near the portables at the back of the school, reading the letter.  The letter that had had four pages.

It didn't take four pages to say that you were running away to change yourself.  And Joey wasn't stupid -- he'd guessed over a year ago, when Tristan and Bakura had started hanging out more.  He'd actually ribbed Tristan about it, asking if the brunet was trying to replace him with a new second-in-command.

"I know he's pretty good wit' a knife, but I don't think he c'n hold his own inna plain fist fight," Joey had added with a casual smirk.

Tristan had just snorted and looked away.  "Don't be an idiot," he'd muttered.  "It's . . . it's not like that."

Joey had guessed a long time ago . . . he just didn't want confirmation.  That would make things weird, and he knew he wouldn't be able to look at Tristan in quite the same way anymore.  So it was easier to pretend that he was too dumb to figure it out, the same way he pretended about everything else he couldn't fix or beat into submission.

He **did** feel bad about it, though.  Because it sucked that Tristan had to deal with the fact that his boyfriend had abandoned everything in his old life, including himself, while acting like they had just been friends.


	2. Nevermore

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. "Nevermore" belongs to Edgar Allen Poe.

A sermon I heard recently included this line: "The art of living is the ability to live with unanswered questions." That was the starting point of this ficlet.

In Japan, drivers' licenses are not issued until age 18. The hun and po souls may be more of a Chinese concept that a Japanese one, but Bakura strikes me as a Taoist.  
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_"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!   
. . . tell me truly, I implore -  
Is there -_ is _there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!"  
Quoth the raven:_

_"Nevermore."___

.

It was an accident, of course.

It had to be an accident, because it certainly wasn't a murder, and Tristan Taylor wasn't the sort of person who would commit suicide.

So after the mess with the police and the coroner and the graveyard office, it was marked down as an unfortunate motorcycle accident. The funeral was held on a bright, cool afternoon.

There were a few that mourned his death, and some that went "That sucks, I'm sorry" before going on with their own lives, and many who hadn't known that he was alive in the first place so the fact that he no longer was didn't mean much to them. It was no more than could be expected. There might have been more of an interest if anything had been suspicious about the event, but the only thing close to that was the fact that Tristan didn't have insurance and had been driving without a license.

Even Joey assumed it was an accident. Right until he learned that Tristan had been driving without a helmet that day.

-----

Tristan was fanatical about helmets. Even before they had met Yûgi, when Joey still assumed he was immortal and told himself it didn't matter if he died so long as he took the other guy down with him, Tristan wouldn't drive unless he and whoever was riding with him were wearing their helmets. It had annoyed Joey to no end, but he went with it.

It wasn't just the safety deal, after all -- Tristan had bought the bike with a fake ID, since he was three years too young to get a real driver's license. That meant he not only always wore helmets, he also (almost) always obeyed the traffic laws, because getting hauled down to the police station was not high on his list of Good Things. Joey wore the helmet for the same reason.

So when he learned that Tristan hadn't had one that day, he realized that there was something off about the whole deal. That's when he started looking for anything else that he might have missed, because he wanted to prove himself wrong.

-----

When he started thinking back, it was almost painful how obvious it should have been.

The week before the accident-that-wasn't-an-accident, Tristan had asked Joey and everyone else if there was anything out of his videos that they wanted. The brunet had a pretty extensive collection of American Westerns and horror movies, with a few miscellaneous titles thrown into the mix; and he'd said that he was cleaning up his room and wanted more space. According to Tristan, he was going to sell off most of what he had, so they'd better pick out anything they wanted before he cashed it all in.

Bakura had had a blast going through Tristan's horror collection and insisted on paying him for the half-dozen movies he carried away. Yûgi and Téa hadn't seen anything they liked, and Devlin didn't bother to look. Joey had taken a subtitled copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and thought nothing more about it, since he'd had seemed genuinely happy to rid of the stuff.

And then, the next couple of days, Tristan had been acting weird. Not moody or depressed or anything, but . . . chipper. That was the only way Joey could describe it. It was kind've like the way the brunet had acted when he'd first seen Serenity again, only he tripped over stuff less and wasn't so insufferably vocal with his cheerfulness. It was a little more quiet, like he was looking forward to the weekend.

Joey had harassed him mercilessly about having a new girlfriend, but Tristan just brushed it off. He didn't blush, either, which eventually made Téa and Devlin join the act. By that point, Tristan had started looking annoyed, and finally Devlin said that if Tristan didn't have a new girlfriend he must have a new boyfriend and that he would be glad to personally break the news to Serenity.

The shouting match that'd ensued resulted in the three of them -- Tristan, Devlin, and himself because hell would freeze before he let a sleaze like Devlin near his little sister -- getting detention, which had sucked, but Tristan hadn't seemed to mind. He just slept. Joey sulked manly-like in one of the desks, and Devlin played with his dice in between doing homework.

Joey never did homework in detention. Tristan didn't, either, but he usually made an effort to **look** like he was. He didn't just out-right snooze -- at least, not any of the times Joey had been stuck there with him.

Joey couldn't remember if Tristan had slacked off on his work during the week or not. He'd never paid that much attention in the first place, since the brunet usually didn't do enough that he could copy off it.

In hindsight, he wanted to kick himself for that.

In hindsight, Joey wanted to do a lot of things.

-----

There was no note, of course.

That was part of the reason why everyone assumed it had been an accident. There was no note, there had been no veiled comments, there had been no signs of depression, Tristan's grades hadn't suddenly fallen off, he wasn't having girl problems or bully problems or anything. Why he had killed himself, **if** he had killed himself, was known only to him.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise to Joey, when he thought about it. Tristan had always kept his secrets, his problems, his life's story to himself. He played his cards close to his chest, and only gave away pieces of himself at rare and scattered intervals; and then only to the people he really cared about. There was no explanation for why he had died, because Tristan wouldn't have thought that anyone needed to know. That closed-lippedness had been one of the things that Joey had admired about him when they first met, but now it was driving him crazy.

Because it meant that there weren't any **answers**. All he had to piece together a reason was Tristan's actions before the crash, and Joey just hadn't been paying enough attention for that.

-----

It was the jacket that should have tipped him off. **Really** should have tipped him off. As in, he was a fucking moron for not noticing.

Or maybe not, but in hindsight it seemed so damn obvious that Joey couldn't help but think that it had been obvious then, too.

They'd all gone to an arcade that Friday afternoon. Téa had been kicking some poor sucker's ass at DDR, and Bakura and Yûgi were busy playing some game or another that was competitive. Tristan had slouched against a console, watching Téa and looking a little bored, so Joey went over to talk to him. It was kinda dull seeing Yûgi win all the time, anyway.

Tristan had started to wave, and wound up tearing the sleeve of his coat on one of the machines. Joey hadn't been looking that hard, so he couldn't remember if it had been an accident or if Tristan had done it deliberately.

Tristan glared down at the rip and swore under his breath, while Joey snickered at him for being a klutz. Then Tristan shrugged out of the jacket and examined it again, his expression eventually changing to resignation. "Eh, I need to get a new one, anyway. These sleeves're too short." He glanced over the coat one last time, then shrugged and looked at Joey. "Hey, you want it?"

"Huh?" He'd been watching Téa grin in victory and look around for another challenger, so he figured he'd heard wrong.

"The coat, Joey. D'ya want it?"

"Aren't you gonna keep it around?"

"Naw. Like I said, the sleeves're getting too short. I must be gettin' more muscular by the day," he'd added with a smirk.

"You wish," Joey had replied, rolling his eyes.

"Shuddup," Tristan had muttered. "Here, take the damn thing off my hands."

"What, you shred it up and wanna toss it over to me? Whadda I look like, a garbage can?"

"Why not, you **eat** like a garbage disposal. 'Sides, it ain't ripped that bad. You can sew it up. It'll give you a chance to work on your domestic skills."

"**What**?"

"I'm just sayin', it's obvious Mai's gonna be the breadwinner in yer home. . . ."

He'd been caught up in the argument and in tossing back insults then, until Téa had yelled for both of them to shut up because they were throwing off her concentration. Somehow, he'd wound up taking the jacket home without really realizing it.

He wore it whenever he visited the grave.

-----

Joey forced down his hatred of cemeteries and made sure he visited once in a while. He owed Tristan that much. But he made sure not to step on any graves whenever he went. Joey also tried not to look at the flowers that were placed on the various tombstones along his path. The real ones were always in the process of dying, which seemed like some sick kind of irony, and the fake ones with their eternal life seemed almost obscene in a place where six feet beneath the immaculately mowed grass sat a layer of corpses. Or cremation urns. Joey wasn't sure which bothered him more, the decomposing bodies or the jugs of ashes of what used to be a human.

Once he saw Devlin there. Joey had hung back a few rows away from Tristan's grave, trying to find somewhere to look that wouldn't remind him that he was surrounded by death. Devlin had sat silently at the foot of the grave for almost twenty minutes after Joey had arrived, toying with a pair of dice in one hand, until he finally stood and walked away. He left the dice on a corner of the tombstone.

A lot of times, he saw Bakura there. The other teenager seemed to come once a week, as best as Joey could tell, and he always sat there for about half an hour and talked to the grave. One time during finals' week, he saw Bakura studying a textbook while speaking. In the choices of being rude to the dead or forgetting about them, Bakura seemed to favor the former.

A few months after everything had happened, Joey spotted Bakura at the grave and circled around the cemetery so that he could get close enough to hear what the teenager was saying without Bakura being able to see him.

The other teenager had been describing the past week, down to Tuesday's duel between Yûgi and Joey that Joey had _almost_ won and the spat that Devlin and Serenity had had two days ago. It had creeped the hell out of Joey to realize how closely Bakura must have been watching all of them to be able to relay this, but at the same. . . . He couldn't figure out exactly what he felt about it. It might have been relief -- Joey was too busy living to take notes on life, and he always felt weird trying to talk to the gravestone, anyway.

After Bakura finished describing one of the movies that had just arrived in theaters, he said goodbye. Then he stood up and brushed off his jeans. Joey leaned a little further back against the tombstone he was sitting behind, hoping both that Bakura would walk past without seeing him and that he didn't accidentally have his feet on the grave in front of him.

"Hey, Joey."

"GYAH!" The shock wound up sending him sprawling right onto the patch of grass he'd been trying to avoid. Joey shoved himself up before he could piss off or get infected by the deceased Neil Oakley, 1938 to 1994, and turned around to face Bakura. "Uh. Hi."

Bakura had his hands in his pockets as he spoke. "You could go talk to him sometime too, you know. I don't mind. And I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

". . . See?" Joey had replied, after an awkward pause. His mouth felt dry. "Hey, can . . . can you **see** him? When you talk? Like, a ghost or something?"

Bakura had smiled.

"Of course not."

The other teenager scuffed at the grass with the toe of his sneakers, before looking back up at Joey. He kept his hands in his pockets. "I never believed in the hun and po souls. The dead, wherever they go, are out of our reach forever. We just pretend like they can hear us so we won't forget about them," he said, still smiling and watching Joey with that kind but detached expression that was so common to him. "But all the same, I'm sure he'd be glad to see you."

". . . Right," Joey said quietly. "I . . . right."

Bakura smiled a little brighter this time, before pulling his hands out of his pockets and waving as he walked away. "I'll see you in class tomorrow!"

"Yeah. See ya."

After Bakura had left the cemetery, Joey stayed where he was, staring at Tristan's grave several feet away. He balled his hands into fists and jammed them into the coat's pockets.

He understood. There was no restless spirit that was going to give him a reason or explanation, no supernatural phenomenon that would let him know one way or the other what had happened and why. There was no answer. There was never going to **be** an answer, because the only person who could have given it was gone. There was no ghost.

It was just that Joey wanted one.


	3. The Path of the Righteous

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. Clockwork Angels belongs to Lea Hernandez.

This story nearly **killed me**.

That being said, there is a limit to the amount of research I am willing to do for a ficlet. Becoming an expert in Japanese sex crimes laws is beyond that limit. Therefore, I would appreciate it if you would suspend disbelief while reading -- especially because if Kaiba _did_ have enemies in the government, he would have to have enough friends to counteract them (thus preventing him from seeing the inside of a courtroom), or he wouldn't have gotten KaibaCorp the game company started in the first place, because there would always have been a permit he was denied or a zoning law he broke or an inspection he failed, etc.  
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"I suppose an orphan would love anyone who would love them back."

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There hadn't even been any rumors, like most scandals had in their first stage. The news just exploded onto the front pages.

It had all the ingredients for a scandal of mass proportions: high-profile subjects, taboo discussion of incest, homosexuality, a minor, and the fact that everybody thought Kaiba was an asshole anyway.

Seto Kaiba, only seventeen, was technically a minor as well; but because he was legally independent, the court had decided to try him as an adult.

The newspapers and tabloids had a field day. The principal had kicked out the reporters who tried to get interviews with their class, but a few succeeded before that. Most of the interviews were negative, save for two. The first good one came from Yûgi, who'd said flatly that the idea was ridiculous and the photos were an obscene prank.

Wherever the photos had come from, they'd started the whole mess. Joey was willing to buy the claim that they were doctored because he just couldn't believe that Kaiba would drop his guard long enough to let someone get a photograph of him that he didn't know about, and especially not in his own bedroom. Kaiba was an asshole, but he was an asshole who was obsessive about his privacy.

That was why Joey had given the only other favorable interview, much to the rest of the class's surprise. He'd told the reporter that Kaiba was a lot of things -- a jerk, a snob, a dense moron -- but he cared about Mokuba and would never abuse him in the way that people were trying to make it look like he was.

(Joey privately thought that if Kaiba **were** having sex with his little brother, he would never be stupid enough to get caught; but he didn't mention that.)

He also didn't mention that the whole thing reeked of a set-up, because Yûgi had done it for him; but that didn't change the fact that the prefecture that Domino City was in was one of the liberaler ones -- the age of consent was thirteen -- and Joey had a vague idea that Mokuba's birthday wasn't more than half a year away. If the rumors _were_ true, Joey thought it was suspicious that Kaiba hadn't managed to keep it under wraps for just six months more, when Mokuba wouldn't have been underage any longer.

Considering the way Kaiba lived, it didn't seem surprising that he had contingency plans set aside in the case of his imprisonment or sudden death. Mokuba would be named the temporary head of KaibaCorp for the potential length of time that he was in jail. That, plus school, plus the dregs of the trial and the paparazzi, would be a hell of a burden to lay on a twelve-year-old; but Mokuba didn't show any outward signs of being overwhelmed. He was a Kaiba, after all -- he could handle it. And unlike his brother, Mokuba understood what the phrase "delegation of authority" meant.

Joey didn't know anything about the legal system, at least not the version that applied in courts and didn't cover the streets, but the whole thing seemed vaguely wrong to him. Mokuba wasn't pressing charges -- Mokuba seemed incredulous that anyone would believe the case in the first place -- but because he was a minor, the court stepped in and said that they were going to act for him, because he was too young to think for himself. That didn't seem compatible with the fact that Mokuba would be running KaibaCorp if the trial **did** take place, but everyone ignored that.

Plus, Joey couldn't figure out why someone as rich as Kaiba was actually seeing the inside of a court room. Devlin told him it probably had something to do with the enemies Kaiba had made in the government when he'd changed one of their main weapons manufacturers into a games producer. Joey still thought that was wrong, but Devlin said he could bring in a law book and prove it, so he let it go.

It wasn't like the Kaiba brothers needed his concern, anyway. Both of them had painted on a perfect façade. When the inquiry began, Kaiba had picked one facial expression, cold but faintly amused condescension, and had kept it ever since. Mokuba continually stated that the whole thing was absurd. But he didn't do it frantically, or repeat it too often, which would have implied the opposite. He just said, "This is stupid. They can't charge Seto for a non-existent crime," with a slight sneer and the complete calm of a person who knew there was no evidence to base a charge on.

The trouble was that both Kaiba and Mokuba were very, very smart, and they could just as easily be lying as they could be telling the truth. Joey couldn't decide.

He **wanted** to believe that Mokuba was being honest, because hell . . . as mature as he might be, he was still just a child. And he was a child who was scarily devoted to his big brother -- anything Kaiba wanted from Mokuba, he could probably get it.

Which was why he really, _really_ wanted Mokuba to be telling the truth. Though Joey had never liked Kaiba, he gave the guy credit for not being that much of a sick bastard.

But eventually, the inquiry turned into a trial.

Despite the claims that the pictures were photoshopped, the specialists looking at them couldn't determine that they weren't real; and that seemed to be enough proof for the prosecution to have their way. If Mokuba had been willing to testify against Kaiba, the trial might have gone smoother; but he was being stubbornly disagreeable on that point. He had publicly stated that he had no interest in committing perjury just to help the enemies of KaibaCorp.

From the very beginning, both Kaiba and Mokuba had been speaking as if everything was deliberately set up by someone out to destroy their company. Since the police had been unable to determine who had sent the photos to every respectable newspaper in the prefecture (the packages had come from a mailing company out of Tokyo), their statements could very well have been correct. Kaiba's lawyers had picked up the claim immediately and used it at all possible moments.

But, as Tristan had commented the morning he and Joey were watching through the windows as the reporters got kicked out of the school, their statements were also a really good way of twisting the purpose of the trial to a different angle.

That hadn't helped Joey let go of the lingering doubts he had. Kaiba knew how to work the law, after all.

Because Mokuba wouldn't testify, the prosecution started talking about taking "tests" to determine whether the two had had intercourse recently. That started a riot from the defense about the rights of minors, which prompted a counter-riot from the prosecution about obstruction of justice and the Child Welfare Law, and around that point Joey got lost in the legalities. He gave up trying to follow the trial and just skimmed the paper during his deliveries every morning, looking for the announcement of a 'guilty' or 'not guilty' verdict.

In the end, because both Mokuba and Kaiba denied the charges of statutory rape and corruption of a minor, it came down to which set of lawyers could out-talk the other. It took a week's worth of deliberation from the jury, but Kaiba's lawyers won. The idea of whether or not bribery was involved was brought up, but eventually discarded.

And so Kaiba was released from prison. He went back to school and back to his company, treating the whole incident as an uninteresting farce not worth remembering, and he continued his work as efficiently as ever.

But KaibaCorp's reputation, especially internationally, was irreparably damaged.

And neither the police nor Kaiba himself ever figured out where the photos had originally come from.


	4. Ballerina Mom

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. The future belongs to us all.

The ficlet's title is the same as a story in Brian Andreas's Strange Dreams collection, and the last two sentences are paraphrased from that story.  
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It had been a quiet wedding. Yûgi and Téa decided to just invite family and friends and friends' family, and since most of their friends didn't talk to their families, it was a fairly small affair.

Yûgi's fame had died out a little while after the Duel Monsters craze had, and Téa hadn't made a big name for herself in the world of dance yet, so there wasn't even any press to contend with.

Joey had been the best man, given the first toast after the ceremony, whistled and catcalled as the two left to catch the plane for their honeymoon until Yûgi was practically red and Mai made him stop, and allowed Mai to drive him home even though he was hardly drunk.

Solomon Mutou died before they had their first child, and they named the boy after him.

Yûgi inherited the game store, and Joey sometimes worked there when he had a day off or when he was drifting between jobs, since Téa was usually too busy watching the younger Solomon to help at the counter.

Mai continued meet him once a week or so for dinner, but she refused to call the meetings "dates" until Joey stopped being an under-achiever and found himself a real, steady job that he enjoyed.

Once she had asked him why he never tried to make something better of his life. It wouldn't have been hard--Joey was a good carpenter, and that was a skill that was in demand at the time. He never told her that he knew it wasn't a good thing for a person to tie themselves to someone who would stand in their way, no matter how much they might have cared for them.

He spent a lot of time trying to convince Serenity to date people who weren't like him. It wasn't an easy task.

Eventually Téa and Yûgi had more children, this time twin girls, and as they grew up they proved to be even greater hellions that Solomon was. Joey had commented once that all the Mutou children took after their mother, and had gotten a spatula thrown at him with great force and alacrity.

He had called that proof and then ran downstairs and hid in the game shop with Yûgi where Téa wouldn't come after him.

More time passed, and they all grew older, and Mai finally found someone better for her, and Serenity continued to date guys who weren't good enough for her, and one day Joey found that to get to his current job he had to take a bus from the same station that the Mutou kids took to school.

Téa usually saw them off from the station, so she and Joey would chat together for however much they had time between when she arrived and when his bus pulled up. They never talked about anything special; current events, the economy and Yûgi's store, news about their friends, and--very rarely--the old times. Sometimes Téa lectured him about alcohol.

(Despite the fact that he knew it was stupid, and despite the fact that the last thing in the world he wanted to be like was his father, Joey had started drinking more often after Mai's marriage.)

They didn't talk about past goals. It was an unspoken agreement between the two of them.

Though Joey never said anything about it, he'd noticed that Téa stood the bus stop with her right foot always in front and perpendicular to the left just so.

Even after three children, she still dreamed of being a dancer.


	5. One Song Glory

Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh! belongs to Kazuki Takahashi. "One Song Glory" belongs to Rent.

This was supposed to be about Yûgi, and wound up being about Ryō. Again. I think I'm too fond of that character.

Though it doesn't come up, the other person that Tristan refers to is Yûgi (and thus Atemu) himself.  
------------

.

_The Game King is dead; long live the Game King_.

.

He was worried about Yûgi.

They'd all dealt with the plane ride back from Egypt differently: Joey had stared out the window at the clouds, Bakura had slept, Téa had claimed that she'd gotten a cold and kept a packet of kleenexes close by, and Tristan and Devlin had played some game that involved dice and a lot of under-the-breath insults. Yûgi had toyed with the chain that had once held the Puzzle. He hadn't let go of it for the whole trip, except for the brief times that they went through metal detectors.

He still wore it, when he wasn't at school.

Joey couldn't figure out what to do. At first he stayed quiet and let Yûgi grieve--they all needed to do that, so it hadn't been hard--but after two weeks had passed, it began to worry him. Yûgi was still a lot quieter than he'd used to be, and he didn't smile as much, and when he did it wasn't as bright. And he wouldn't play Duel Monsters, despite Joey's efforts to coax him into a game. There was always some excuse, usually homework to be finished before the next class or work to be done in his grandfather's shop after school, that Yûgi would give to get out of it.

Finally, he mentioned it to Tristan, because Téa was hardly objective on this matter and it wasn't like he could really bring it up to Yûgi himself.

"Yeah, I noticed," Tristan said one morning before school. Joey had woken up early just to catch him before class started. Only for Yûgi would he disturb his sleep like that.

"So, what d'ya think we should do about it?" Joey asked. "I mean, he won't **duel**. It's twisted." He slouched into the chair he'd pulled from the desk beside Tristan. "But I've tried everythin' I can think of to get him to go out. He keeps shooting me down with all these excuses. An' I can't just say 'Get over it!' or anythin'; that's. . . ." He kicked at the desk in front of him. "Dammit."

Tristan leaned back, resting his feet on Devlin's chair just to piss off the other teenager when he arrived. "Have you talked to Bakura?"

"Huh? Why?"

Tristan shrugged. "He's probably the only one who can understand what Yûgi's goin' through."

"Atemu and that evil guy were totally different."

"Well, duh," Tristan said, rolling his eyes. "But Bakura's still gonna understand better than any of us would. And it's not like he'll refuse to help you think of something. Even if he hated Atemu, he still--"

"Hey, hey!" Joey straightened up. "What are you talkin' about?"

Tristan raised an eyebrow. "That'll he'll help you?"

"No, that crap about him hating Atemu."

Tristan just looked at him without speaking for a few seconds.

"What?!" Joey snapped

"You never **noticed**?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Tristan made an awkward gesture with his hand. "Joey. Man. It was pretty damn obvious. Why do you think he built that freakin' Memory World game?"

Tristan almost had a point there, but it was contradicting the fact that Joey would have noticed if Bakura had been _that_ big of a threat to Yûgi. He glared. "Just because he got manipulated into . . . doing stuff that nearly killed us all . . . that doesn't mean that he hated Yûgi!"

"I never **said** he hated Yûgi." Tristan looked vaguely annoyed now. "I said he hated Atemu. They were different people. He and Yûgi are friends, so go ask him what to do."

Joey refused to accept the subject change. "You're not making any friggin' sense--why would he hate Atemu? Atemu kept saving him from that Ring spirit!"

"There wasn't a Millennium Ring until there was a Millennium Puzzle," Tristan replied.

Joey was quiet for a moment.

After the game was over, Atemu had told the rest of them what the evil Bakura had told him about Kuru Eruna. Then he had turned and given the normal Bakura an undecipherable look, before asking: "Did that truly happen?"

Bakura had paused. Then he had shrugged and replied "He thought it did," before holding out the Ring for Atemu to take.

". . . I still think you're talking crazy," Joey said after half a minute.

"Christ," Tristan muttered, glancing away. "Look, it's not like I'm the only one who. . . . I told you, it was obvious."

"How?"

"It was right there in his eyes," Tristan said flatly. "Every time Yûgi changed into Atemu, for a split second he'd get this really cold expression. You just had to look past that smile he's always hiding behind."

Joey stared at him. Tristan continued to look away, out the windows.

He still couldn't quite believe the brunet's claim, but he was starting to believe that Tristan believed it. "I don't--"

"Dammit Joe, either go talk to him or don't," Tristan snapped. "But I can't help you. Sorry."

Joey glared and was about to tell him to drop the attitude, but Devlin chose that moment to walk in and yell at Tristan for putting his dirty shoes on his seat. Tristan physically dismissed Joey by turning away and replying to the insult.

Joey shoved away from the brunet's desk, sat down at his own, and stewed until the teacher came in.

But the next morning, after Yûgi had once again turned down his offer to hang out at the arcade, Joey decided to take Tristan's advice. He even hauled his ass out of bed early **again** and (after delivering his papers with an incredible lack of precision) arrived at school half an hour before anyone else in their group would be there--besides Bakura.

The trip to Egypt had taken place during the fall break, and when the semester started a week later, Bakura had signed up for the track team. Or, more specifically, he had rejoined it. Joey had been mildly surprised to learn that the guy had been a runner at his old high school; Bakura had always struck him as the type more into games than sports.

(Tristan had commented--out of Bakura's earshot--that it explained a lot. When Joey had asked him what he meant, he'd replied: "For a guy to walk around with a bloody gaping hole in his arm and pretend it's nothing takes some impressive endurance.")

So, knowing that the team practiced before school during the winter term, Joey made his way over to the track behind the gym and waited for Bakura be done.

"Hey, Joey!" Bakura had replied as he walked up, wiping off his face with a hand. "Can I help you?"

"Yeah. Kinda. It's . . . it's about Yûgi," Joey told him.

Bakura nodded. "Okay. Can you tell me while I walk to the locker room?"

"Yeah." Joey clenched his fists and pushed them a little deeper into his pockets, slouching slightly as he walked. "You've--ya noticed that he's not hanging out with us anymore, right?"

Bakura frowned and tilted his head slightly. "I went out with him and Téa to eat burgers a few days ago. He's not nearly as talkative as he used to be, though, if that's what you mean?"

"No, I meant. . . ." Joey trailed off as he followed Bakura into the gym, felling vaguely uncomfortable at discussing this when surrounded by guys he didn't know. Bakura apparently picked up on it, because he started walking slower and fell behind the rest of his teammates. "He's still wearing the chain. And he won't play Duel Monsters anymore. Hell, he won't play games at all. It's . . . I mean, I miss Atemu too, but--I dunno, it creeps me out."

Joey had glanced at Bakura's face when he'd said Atemu's name, just to prove to himself that Tristan was wrong; but Bakura had glanced away at that moment.

"Well, it kind've makes sense . . ." Bakura replied.

"Yeah, I know, but still. It's not normal." He looked over at the other teenager. "Can you, like . . . think of anything?"

Bakura paused a couple feet from the locker room door. He sucked part of his bottom lip beneath his teeth for a moment, apparently debating something, before he finally looked up at Joey. "Let him mourn."

Joey started to reply, but Bakura held up a hand. "I know, it sounds like I'm telling you not to help him, but . . . I don't think you can understand what's happened, Joey. Even I can't claim to understand; but I know that every time he looks at his deck, it's going to bring back memories. It's going to take a while for him to be able to stand that."

"But . . . it's not like he never played it himself! It was his deck too! I know that he'll remember things, but I just. . . ." Joey shoved his bangs out of his face.

The other teenager looked away, before fidgeting slightly and pulling his ponytail up away from the back of his neck. There was an awkward silence between them for several seconds.

". . . ." Bakura leaned against the wall. ". . . You know, I still can't play Monster World," he said quietly.

When Joey looked over at him, he gave the blond a self-deprecating smile. "Even now that I **know** nothing can happen, I still. . . . It's going to take him a while."

Joey wasn't totally sure what to say to that. "Uh."

"Don't worry, though. He'll be okay in the end." Bakura smiled again, this time encouragingly. "He's the new Game King now, after all. And there are plenty of other games to play besides Duel Monsters. Just give him some more time--as long as he has us around, he'll be sad, but it won't turn into a harmful depression or anything."

". . . Yeah. I guess so." Joey shrugged. "I just don't like not bein' able ta do somethin' for him."

Bakura nodded. "I know . . . but I think this is the best thing right now." After a few more moments of silence, he straightened away from the wall. "Was there anything else you needed?"

"Er. No," Joey said. He shifted on his feet. "Thanks for the help. You're not gonna be late to class, are ya?"

Bakura shook his head. "It's fine!"

The other teenager had just stepped away from the wall when Joey's mouth blurted out without his permission: "Hey, Bakura? You didn't--**hate** Atemu or anything, did you?"

Bakura paused, staring down at the floor, and his bangs shadowed the expression in his eyes. Then he looked up and gave Joey a smile, before turning around and walking toward the locker room door.

Bakura waved a hand over his shoulder without turning around and called, "I'll see you in class!" And then he disappeared into the locker room, leaving the other teenager standing in the hall.

Joey stayed there for several minutes, before finally walking slowly to the classroom. Yûgi was sitting at his desk when he arrived, so he joked with him about copying Téa's answers to the homework for a couple minutes.

Joey didn't mention anything about dueling. Or games.


End file.
